


gladiolus

by jouissant



Category: Rome (TV 2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Rocks Fall Everyone Dies, Suicide, sometimes helping your boyfriend stab himself is something that can be so personal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:53:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25995550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: They come upon the house early in the evening, having walked all day and through the previous night.
Relationships: Mark Antony/Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger
Comments: 3
Kudos: 28





	gladiolus

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to tumblr user endofvanity for plot help <3

They come upon the house early in the evening, having walked all day and through the previous night. It sits against a hillside, the swell of terrain more gentle than any Brutus can recall from his time abroad, but still the same relentless dun of the battlefield, tinged here and there with yellow-green that speaks to the presence of water. 

A snake roils on the threshold, and Brutus kicks it away with a blistered foot. By now Antony is dead weight, febrile and delirious, and Brutus can no longer bear him up. The house itself must be an omen, the snake another, but how they fit together Brutus does not know and is too tired to fathom. He fears he has no god yet on his side to consult, no time to court one back by prayer or sacrifice.

“I suppose a bed would be too much to expect,” Brutus says to Antony, for the house is empty save a few bleached piles of tinder. 

Antony does not reply, merely groans when Brutus lowers him onto the dirt floor. Brutus’s knees give out on the way down and Antony slides from his grasp, crying out in pain. The makeshift bandage at his side is seeping red. The sight of it is dizzying, and Brutus feels badly for how eager he is to set Antony down and step away. Antony’s eyes flutter open sightlessly and then fall closed again. His breaths are wet and heavy, but they come, and this is all Brutus feels he can ask for. 

They have next to nothing. Weapons, empty wineskins and the cloaks they wear. Brutus has ripped his tunic to mid-thigh to dress Antony’s wound and may have to donate the remainder to the effort. “Ought to have cut yours,” he mutters. “It’s your style, not mine.” 

His voice sounds small to his own ears, seems to bounce around the pale stone walls of their erstwhile shelter like an errant bird. How filthy the place is: swallows’ nests tucked in all four corners, the stone beneath them streaked with shit. The room bears a sweetish animal smell Brutus cannot identify. Perhaps the house belonged to a shepherd, a lonely man who slept here among his flock. Under the circumstances, thinks Brutus, it does not seem a bad life. No matter what befell him here, the shepherd probably assassinated no one, probably did not desert his own army in the midst of battle, nor flee its ruin with his enemy. A simpler life, it would have been. The sort of life Brutus used to dream of, watching the hearthfire eat his poems verse by verse. 

He considers Antony. Is his color worse or better? He had moved well for a time, been his usual truculent self as they began to pick their way through the foothills beyond Philippi. Sometime after dark he had begun to falter, but Brutus was afraid to stop, imagining the assassins Octavian had surely sent after them, men made swifter and more cunning by his dogging fear. Brutus had spoken near-ceaselessly to Antony to keep him moving, had talked his throat raw and sore. But they are here, for whatever it’s worth, and Antony still lives. 

“I’ll come back, all right?” he says to Antony, setting a hand to his brow. The flesh there is cool, yet Antony sweats, stirring and murmuring under Brutus’s hand. His eyelids flutter. What dream courses beneath them? Brutus hopes it is a good one, which for Antony is no doubt full of blood and of viscera, of screaming, of war. 

Outside he gathers more firewood and sets it in a pile. He hears the babbling of water and finds a stream a little ways off in the opposite direction. He fills their skins, then strips and wades in, splashing himself with the frigid water, washing away dirt and blood. He soaks his tunic, wrings it out and soaks it again. He shivers. Relieved of its panicked verve his body has begun to ache and sting, and Brutus is vaguely aware that he is hungry, but he is too tired to do anything about it. He goes back into the house and builds a small fire in the blackened hearth, pleased with himself for handling the flint. The fire hisses and spits, but it catches. He sits before it naked until he and his tunic are dry, and then he goes to Antony, who lies along the wall, still but for the rise and fall of his chest. 

Brutus lay with Antony for the first time when they were young enough not to think of regretting it. And they didn’t, not for many years. Brutus has forgotten whether or not he still does, which he takes to be a symptom of extreme fatigue. He stretches out beside Antony, who murmurs in his sleep, turns toward Brutus as though drawn by the warmth of his body, whimpers as he jostles his injury. 

“Shh,” says Brutus. “Sleep.”

Again he touches Antony’s face and finds it discomfitingly cool. Brutus draws his cloak over them both. His last thought before Morpheus takes him is that at least the fire will keep wild beasts away. He cannot say the same for death, or for Octavian.

* * *

Brutus thought to die before this was all over, to run on his sword or to run at the enemy. But nothing has come to pass as planned. Instead it was Antony felled before him, Brutus whose vision narrowed to the sight of Antony’s bright blood, who ran not at the enemy but at his own men, screaming inchoate orders, thrusting his sword at them to get them away. 

Antony had been on his knees in the dirt, both hands on his wound. He had laughed at Brutus. How foolish you look, he said. Like a boy. Then he grinned and drew the arrow out. 

“You need a poultice,” Brutus says. 

“I need to not have a fucking gut wound,” Antony says. His face is pallid as the moon. 

“You’ve the strength to needle me. That is something.” 

“It’s a poultice for my heart, Marcus. Stay close, will you? I fear I’ll need it over and over.” He clutches Brutus’s arm. 

Brutus pulls away. “Don’t call me Marcus,” he says. 

“Do you remember when your mother caught us out? I still hear her voice in my nightmares. How she carried on. ‘Oh, Marcus, Marcus!’ Like an incantation, it was. Never thought I’d see Servilia of the Junii wring her hands.” 

“You have that effect on mothers.” 

“I rather do, don’t I?” 

He offers Brutus a diluted smile. Brutus busies himself with the cloak, arranging it over Antony again. For all his years of deepest irritation with this man Brutus has never liked him tempered, and can barely look upon him now. “You ought to save your strength,” he says. 

Antony’s smile fades to nothing. “You were pleased enough to hear me talk this morning.” 

Brutus gets to his feet. “I’m going out. I’m going to try to find us something to eat.” 

“Ought I to eat?” Antony grimaces. “Won’t it fall out onto the floor?” He looks down at his belly. Brutus has redressed the wound and the bandage is yet clean and dry, though he cannot say for how long. “Don’t go now. Stay here and tell me again how I scandalized Servilia. You can do her faces. When you’re put out the likeness is uncanny.” 

Brutus feels his throat draw closed. “I’m going now,” he says. “Lie still. I shall be put out if you’re bleeding when I return.” 

Antony grunts. “I may be dead when you return.” He turns away from Brutus as though to inspect the stone wall. 

Brutus has often observed that Antony would rather be abused than ignored, and he tells himself that now is no exception. He must pretend this is no more than Antony’s general horror at losing the focus of Brutus’s attention, otherwise he fears he will no longer be able to think. He turns and goes without another look at Antony. Outside, he rests his head on the wall a moment until the sob in his mouth has shrunk enough to be swallowed.

* * *

Brutus is a hopeless hunter. He has never hunted with Antony, but he imagines he is beside him as he moves through the woods, commenting on Brutus’s lack of stealth, his clumsy hand on the knife handle. Brutus has the far-fetched idea that he might flush out some bird or rabbit, but he finds nothing, as though the wild denizens of this patch of country have seen them coming and long fled. At last he comes upon a wild grapevine heavy with fruit, its central stem thick as his wrist. It trains over an anemic tree, from which it has stolen the sun, and hangs low enough that even Brutus can scale the trunk to reach it. He is heartened by these grapes, which are dusty blue and taut with juice.

Brutus could never gain Diana’s favor, being firstly a man and secondly no hunter, but perhaps the goddess has seen fit to reward him anyway, having seen him struggle and taken pity. He gathers as many grapes as he can reach, holds them in the lap of his tunic like a farmer. On his way back to the house, he stops to rinse them in the stream. As he does he spies a slim brown fish, its scales glinting in the depths, and Diana furnishes him with another idea. 

Brutus removes his sandals and steps into the water. He recalls hearing someone talk about fishing once, though he cannot recall the individual or the context. He knows only that they spoke of shadows, and how fish can divine them from beneath the surface of the water. So he takes care to move through the current with his body just so, his movements barely perceptible as he moves forward. His mind empties, as though all memory and experience has drained from it, leaving only an acute, preternatural perception. Brutus feels the sun on his skin, the icy clutch of the water at his calves and ankles. He hears the wind in the brush. He freezes. At the first hint of movement in the water he lunges forward. His fingers close around a slippery, squirming body and he gasps, loses his grip, the fish flinging itself back towards his body. Brutus cries out in shock. The fish is larger than he expected and difficult to keep ahold of. He clutches it against his chest, slick as a newborn baby. Alone in the stream, cradling his twitching quarry, Brutus begins to laugh. 

He returns to the house some time later, carrying his spoils. He has the grapes and a brace of fish, and he feels lighter despite the burden. He has nearly forgotten the battle. Was it only days ago? Brutus thinks it must have been longer. Years, perhaps. Or perhaps he has borne them back into the past somehow, and it has not happened at all. The possibility appeals to him. He steps through the doorway humming a long-forgotten song. 

The blood looks beautiful on the floor, like a bolt of carmine linen. Antony lies supine, as Brutus left him. He is awake, eyes open and glassy. They flit to Brutus’s face, to the fruit in his arms, to the fish he has wrapped in grape leaves. His bandage is soaked through again. 

“I didn’t move,” says Antony. “I promise.” He sounds like a child intent on staving off punishment.

Brutus is on his knees in a moment. He scrapes back the hair plastered to Antony’s forehead. He seems seems further diminished, the gilt and bluster of the battlefield as distant to him as to Brutus. They had stripped the armor from him on the plain, Brutus desperate to look, to endure the gash in Antony’s side was not as dire as he feared. Antony had seemed carefree; he must still have been quite drunk on fighting. He had continued to laugh even as Brutus saw the wound and cursed, screamed into his hands at the rent flesh, the gouts of blood, the sheer futility of all of it. First Cassius, he remembers thinking, and now this.

The truth, of course, is that he’d have watched Cassius die a hundred times over to spare them what is coming now. 

He probes Antony’s belly with careful fingers. The bleeding seems to have slowed again, but Brutus doesn’t know whether or not to be relieved. Perhaps the blood grows sluggish because there is so little of it. Antony’s face is chalky, his eyes sunken into his head.

“Are you hungry?” Brutus asks. 

“Thirsty. I could drink a vat of wine.” 

“I’ve the next best thing.”

He plucks a grape from its stalk and holds it to Antony’s lips. The grape is so large that it takes Antony two bites to finish it. His lips close over Brutus’s fingertips, and when he pulls away Brutus feels them tingle as with cold. He sits beside Antony and feeds him grapes until he can eat no more. 

“I used to dream about that,” says Antony. He laughs, then shivers. “Come lie down with me.” 

“I fished. I’ve got to build a fire and cook them.” Brutus passes Antony a skin full of water. He sips from it, winces. 

“What on earth did you fish with?” 

“My hands.” He looks down at his palms, still disbelieving. “Antony, I think--I think the gods are smiling on us.” 

Antony shakes his head. “Dis alone cares for me now,” he says. 

“Do not talk so. You’ll squander what fortune we do have.” Brutus goes to the hearth and begins to fuss with the flint, but the stones slip in his hands and the tinder will not catch. 

“Listen to yourself.” Antony coughs. “I will say what I like, and the gods may do what they will with me, when they will it. Sooner than later, I should hope. I find all this bleeding tiresome. Oh, come over here. You’ll hurt yourself.” 

Brutus brings him the flint and watches him set the long strip of bark alight. He feels a pang of uselessness: even bearing a mortal wound Antony is the more resourceful of the two of them. He passes Brutus the makeshift torch. Brutus tries hard to think of no symbols whatsoever, wrapping the fish back in the grape leaves and setting them into the hot coals to bake, the way he has seen the camp cooks do. 

“There,” says Antony, sounding petulant. “Now your precious fish are roasting. Lie with me.” 

Brutus is hungry and thirsty himself, and looks longingly at the fish, which won’t take long to cook. But he sighs and settles next to Antony anyway, dragging his pack under his head. And here is Antony, pillowing his own head on Brutus’s chest. Oh, thinks Brutus. He lowers his arms and draws Antony into an embrace. 

They lie quietly for a time, two beasts unsure of their detente. When Antony speaks at last, his voice is low. Brutus feels it in his chest as a low hum, like the droning of a bee. “I made a mistake,” Antony says.

“You will have to be more specific. I should think you have made a great many mistakes.” Brutus prods him gently with a finger, but Antony does not respond to the ribbing in kind. 

“I should have dined with you that night,” he says. “After the Ides. I should have sent Lepidus to Cassius, no matter how he sniveled. He was afraid Cassius would kill him, and begged not to have to face him. Gods, his whining. I was weak. I could not abide it.” 

Brutus knows logically the dinner occurred: a gesture of goodwill, it had been, between the _liberatores_ and _populares._ And yet for the life of him he cannot recall the barest details of the evening. He has the feeling that had Antony ignored Lepidus’s request and dined with Brutus instead, his memory would be far clearer. 

Brutus shrugs. “Had you dined with me Cassius might well have killed Lepidus, and then who knows what would have happened.” 

“Oh, fuck them.” Antony sniffs. “I should have been with you. I was hurt, you see. Angry. My pride was wounded, but my heart also. I was happy to avoid you. I shall see to Cassius, I said. I was so stupid.” 

“Antony--” 

“Next thing I knew I’d broken with that whelp Octavian and was on the road to Gaul with a beard down to here.” He groans. “Gods, a horror it was. No, Brutus. I know it now, see it clear as diamond. Turning from you was the fatal error.” 

His diatribe leaves him gasping. He pauses. He tries to look at Brutus, to shift up onto an elbow, but he cries out and falls back against Brutus’s side. “Hush,” Brutus says, and without quite knowing what he does he puts his face in Antony’s hair, smelling oil and rank sweat and the faintest jasmine. He shuts his eyes and kisses the crown of Antony’s head. 

“I’m sorry,” Antony says, voice thick. He quiets, seeming to become preoccupied with breathing. Brutus will not, cannot, look again at the wound. If he sees it bleeding he fears he will not be able to prevent himself from making some outburst. But Antony shifts again, stiffening, and down the terse line of his body Brutus glimpses that same damnable red. 

Antony should not be here. The realization hits him with the same deadly accuracy as the arrow that found Antony on the field at Philippi. “ _I_ am sorry,” Brutus says. “You are a soldier, a general, and I have--oh, gods, I have dragged you from your men to die in this desolate place.” 

Antony clasps Brutus’s arm. “So you have recovered your pragmatism at last,” he says. “You admit I’m going to die.” 

Brutus barks a joyless laugh. Before he had been heartened by their banter, but now he sees it was no sign at all. Left up to his own devices Antony will die mid-jibe. He treats his own mortality as though it were merely a difference of approach, some point of protocol on which Brutus ought to be more flexible. Well, Brutus will not bend. 

“I admit nothing,” he says. “Now, will you have some water? Some fish, which I have labored to catch and cook for you?” 

Antony winces. “Give me another one of those grapes.” 

He manages a grape and a few sips of water, and watches as Brutus eats the fish with his hands. It’s not half bad, and for a moment he allows this to cheer him, allows himself to sit in this particular span of time as though it will never pass. The house is warm, the white flesh of the fish is faintly sweet. Antony lies beside him, nearly atop him, one leg flung over both of Brutus’s, and have there not been so many days Brutus longed for this, Antony’s mere presence on a bed or a couch or in an empty room? 

He wipes his fingers off on his tunic and sets his hand in Antony’s hair again. “I wish you’d come to me that night,” Brutus says. “Perhaps--” 

He wants to say, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps things would have been different. He knows this to be true, feels it as strongly as if it were a cloak draped about his shoulders. He cannot say it. He cannot open the door to regret. He has done so before, and where did it get him but sleepless nights and a particular feeling in his chest, an absence, as though a great smooth stone had been lodged there and removed. At once the room seems to still, the profound and blanketing silence of a snowfall. 

Brutus stirs. “Antony?” 

But there is no reply. When he looks over Antony’s eyes have closed, and he has gone to sleep.

* * *

“Marcus.” 

_Do you recall when your mother caught us out?_

“Marcus.” 

_Over and over like an incantation._

Brutus has never been able to sleep, save those months in Greece with Antony, when he would drop into slumber and emerge hours later near-drunk on adequate rest. It was a peace he has not known before or since, one that came to a halt on one particular morning, with his mother’s bony hand on his shoulder. In the moment, he recalls, it had been the work of dragging himself out of quicksand. He remembers waking to see Antony across the room, one side of his face scalded red, palm clapped to it like he was slapping it himself. 

“Marcus. Marcus.” 

_I never thought I’d see Servilia of the Junii wring her hands._

Brutus’s mother has always been prone to drama. Perhaps this is why Antony has never claimed to hate her outright, even in the moments he ought to, even in the moments Brutus himself has hated her. Antony knows well such personal theatrics. All his life he has been a hero in search of a chorus. 

Get dressed, Servilia said in Athens. The slaves are closing up the house. A ship awaits us in the harbor. 

That she turned and left them alone then was, he thinks now, a kind of small mercy. He had gone to Antony. He was sitting cross legged on the floor, working his jaw. Brutus took him by the wrists, unlaced his fingers, replaced them with his own. They said nothing. They sat with their heads bowed together. Boys might have made some pact, prostrated themselves before Venus, wailed and gnashed their teeth. But they are men, and they saw this coming. 

“Marcus.” 

“I told you not to call me that.”

The room is dark. Moonlight pours through the window and into the room, catches in the glossy pool that spills across the floor from Antony’s body. In an instant Brutus is fully conscious. 

“Why didn’t you wake me sooner?” 

“You were dreaming. It seemed--pleasant.” 

Had it been? Brutus cannot remember. 

“I thought it would be done by now,” says Antony. He sounds perturbed, his voice rough. “Do me a favor, will you.” 

“Anything.” 

“Fetch me my sword.” 

“Antony.” Anything but that.

“I tire of this,” Antony says, conjuring the strength to slap his palm against the floor. “My life drains from me by degrees. A butcher would not leave a lamb to die so.” 

“You may yet recover.” 

“I will not recover. You’re a smart man. Don’t insult yourself by laboring under the delusion things will end otherwise.” 

“But--”

“Bring me my sword or I shall crawl over and fetch it myself.” 

Brutus sighs. Antony will try, he knows, and he knows also he will not have the strength to reach the weapon. Brutus dreads the approaching moment, but more than this he dreads the sight of Antony laid out on the floor, grasping for something he cannot attain. To die with honor--is this not attainment at its purest, the point at which one ceases striving and, with dignity, holds fast to the choice at hand? 

The sword is well-wrought in steel. Better made than Brutus’s, or perhaps just easier to handle, though Brutus cast his own sword aside what feels like a decade ago, and his arm feels just as unpracticed as ever. How quickly he has reverted to his former impotent self. This arm can hardly have wielded the knife that dealt Caesar his killing blow. It must have been someone else, he thinks. This arm could not have borne that weight, yet it must bear this one. 

He helps Antony to sit up. His body is heavy and cool, his movements blunted, as though he is formed of clay. But when he takes the sword from Brutus he seems suddenly at ease; he turns it over in his hand with an air of recognition as though reunited with a loyal animal. 

“You’ll have to help me.” 

“I—I can’t.” What would he be if he did not protest? 

“You said you were sorry before, for taking me from my men. They’d have done this for me. I would not even have had to ask.”

Antony smiles, a rusty froth escaping here and there between his teeth. His fingers brush Brutus’s lips, his cheek. Brutus turns his head into the touch, takes Antony’s hand in both of his. He will not relinquish it. One handed there is no way Antony can inflict the wanted wound. A soldier would not need to be asked, a soldier would behave as ordered, would stand unbothered as a column to run his general through. But Brutus is no soldier. He never has been. 

Antony wrests his hand gently from Brutus. “Shall I take this off? I think so, eh?”

Antony shrugs free of the cloak, which has been draped haphazardly about his torso. His movements have made him bleed again, though it does not matter now. 

Young men delight in the thrum of their hearts. In Greece Brutus could hear nothing else for the sound of Antony’s; when he lay atop him and listened it had rushed like a river under his ear. He wonders what he would hear were he to listen now, when most of that river swills hotly about them on the floor of their shelter, soaking into the packed earth. 

Antony offers Brutus the sword’s hilt, bracing it against his hip like the hand of a lover, the smooth heel of Antony’s hand as it had been then, having held few swords, practiced in a different sort of roughness. Antony used to touch him with an ease that frightened Brutus. He wanted to source it, to root it out and interrogate it. Later, when he knew where it came from, Brutus wanted to put it on trial. 

“Well,” says Antony. “I thank you for this. I thank you for everything.” 

Brutus tries to speak. He cannot. Kneeling on another floor years ago Antony told him he was not one for goodbyes. Brutus had agreed, glad of the excuse.

The sword is braced between them. Brutus can feel the pulse in his gut beat against its blunt hilt. He needs both hands to steady the sword; if he did not he would reach for Antony, but as it is the blade must do it for him. The further Antony is the better and yet Brutus wants him closer, wants Antony flush against him, knows the cost and does not care. 

Blood flows freely from Antony’s mouth. 

“Kiss me,” Brutus says. 

“Oh, my love,” says Antony, and falls forward.


End file.
